Servant Leadership Unveiled: Pouring Out Your Life Like Water

The team explores essential values for effective leadership. In this episode, they dive into the concept of servant leadership and its significance in fostering an outward-focused culture. Discover why water serves as a powerful metaphor for servanthood, rooted in biblical references. Gain insights from experienced leaders on cultivating humility and redefining power in the context of serving others.

Episode Highlights:

• Exploring the biblical roots of servanthood and its connection to Jesus' teachings
• Understanding the role of humility in leadership and why it's crucial to embrace a servanthood mindset
• Addressing common issues and blurred lines in organizations striving for an outward focus
• Overcoming entitlement and fostering a servant-oriented culture in churches and faith-based organizations
• Rethinking the concept of power and its relationship to humility and effective leadership.

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Transcript

Well, there you go. Be very, very careful what you say from this point forward. The question is, are you all wearing pants? Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast, designed to help you grow more effective in your leadership. Visit us at Elemental Group dot org for more resources and free downloads. Today I'm here with Dave Workman and Mike Steele, our panel.

My name is Paul. I'm your host and we are working through four different values. And we believe that they are values that are critical to the success, the health, the holistic part of every organization, churches, faith based organizations. And so we've been going through them. We've been talking about organization, integrity, what it means to be whole and integrated.

We've been talking about passion. We're talking today about servant hood, the outward focused mindset. The core idea is this the leader and the team needs to be fiercely committed to a culture that is outward focused. Leadership needs to get to a place where they can clearly say, it's not about us, it's not about what's happening in here, but what's important is what's happening out there.

Guys, I want to talk about that today. So, Dave, Mike, welcome. You guys doing good? SIMON We're doing horrible because we just found out we're having a boy. So our first boy to is now having a boy, so that's exciting. Wow. Well, yeah, well, I'm going to offer some counseling because I've got one boy and three girls. That poor kid is he's doing well now.

But it was a rough road for him. A lot of mothers for sure. That's absolute. Well, that's awesome. That's really good news. So the answer to my question, how are you doing? You're doing well. You just kind of hesitated because you're a little you're a little freaked out maybe. Yeah, I don't I don't know what to do with it, honestly.

Little shocked. We didn't think we'd have a boy, so we're just. Oh, wow. Okay, good. One day at a time, my friend. One day at a time. Dave, how are you doing? I'm doing good, buddy. I'm ready to go. Let's tackle this. Well, Dave, why don't I start with you then? Before we jump into any kind of problem to solve, quote unquote.

Can you define what we're talking about when it comes to servant hood? And then in particular, why do we use water as the element to illustrate servant hood? The quick explanation is that water is is associated with servant hood biblically because of the final days of Jesus washing his disciples feet. So it's just a good metaphor for servant hood and Isaiah's prophecy about the suffering servant.

He says that he poured out his life. So this idea of water means your life being poured out for others. That's the driver of it. The whole concept of servant to it is obviously rooted in the one that we follow. If we follow Jesus, you know, he catches the disciples one day arguing about who gets to be next him.

Basically, he stops them and says, You need to get something straight here. Even I, the son of man, I didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give my life away as a ransom for many. So if that's who we are following and in the same way that we're to imitate him, servant hood becomes the primary way in which we function in this world and with each other, with the folks around us.

That's perfect. Let's dove in as we work with churches and organizations that struggle with a culture of servant hood. Are there any common issues that we see? I'd start with the leader first, and it doesn't matter what the organization is, whether that's the senior pastor or the executive director of a nonprofit or whatever it was over 50 years ago that Robert Greenleaf really put the handle on this whole idea of servant to it.

He called it servant leadership. And his whole thing was that a leader has to serve first before they do anything else, even before aspiring to lead. It's been my contention that the best leaders have been good followers. First, whether that was underneath other leaders or however, in the end, Greenleaf Credo was My success comes from your success. Mike As you have led in the church and led an organizations somewhere along the line, we lose that urgency for being outward focused to having a heart of servant hood.

Have you seen that in the organizations you've led and can you maybe talk about why? Yeah, without a doubt. I don't believe that it's intentional that leaders or organizations can lose that servant hood mindset, but I think it takes extreme intention to keep that servant hood mindset, that servant hood outward focus. But there is a tension in the church I see with servant hood because we're trying to bring people in as well.

So you're bringing people in discipline so they can go out. So there's a tension between how do we help people grow here and go out? I think that's where the blurred lines starts to happen and then entitlement takes over. Right. I mean, I work in a denominational setting and there is entitlement. I've been to churches around here. I've literally sat in someone's seat and someone told me to get up from that seat because that was where they sat every Sunday.

Oh, no kidding. For whatever reason, there's this entitlement that sets in over time because there hasn't been extreme intention to battle against that. I don't know if you guys have seen that as well. Dave, Mike, use the word entitlement. You've been pastoring churches longer than we have. And you've you've been around the world a bit. Where have you seen entitlement creep up and any any ideas as to why or how it rears its ugly head?

Yeah, I think it's because we're fallen creatures. We're obviously going to look out for number one. Okay. And so to develop a servant hood culture in your church, it's going to start with the leader first. I think that servant oriented leaders will shake off entitlement the minute they smell it. You know, that's obviously the danger for a leader is power and power, the way we seem to think about it and describe it in the world.

And that creeps into the church. Is it's very different than the way Jesus talked about it. Here's an example, for whatever reason, and we may end up editing this out because this may go off on a tangent, but for whatever reason, I just never considered God humble. I just never, ever thought of God being a humble God. And maybe because he's so omni everything, you just think, Yeah, that's not it.

And so when Jesus appears on the scene, he puts himself last. He's right in Jerusalem on a donkey. I mean, it's just crazy the amount of humility that expressed in his actions and his words and so forth. And Jesus, I could understand. I could wrap my head around that because it gave us such a clear picture of what humility looks like.

But then when Jesus says, If you've seen me, you've seen the father, then all of a sudden I have to think about God, the Father, as being different. Then I think somehow I internalized it in some weird way. If you have all the power, I didn't see how humility connects with that. And so if humility is the only way that we can really enter the kingdom, which I think is how it works, we finally admit that we don't know really.

We don't know, Jack. We don't know where we came from. We don't know why we're here. We don't know where we're going until we, you know, wrap our heads around. Maybe, I don't know everything. Maybe I need to lean in to God. Then everything changes. But power seen through that lens is something really, really different. And so the world's view of power seems to be kind of an arm above you.

00;07;45;13 - 00;08;12;09
Unknown
I'm over you. I have the right to do this, this, this. I'm entitled to speak down to you to make you do things because I have the power. And somehow Jesus did not function like that, even though he was God. Yeah, it's interesting. I think every one of us slips into this at some point in our career, in our ministry, in our marriages, and our parenting, from humility to entitlement.

And it's just a foothold that I think the devil can grab if we're not paying attention to it. A really interesting component of our human nature, right? Yeah. I mean, I'll give you a real simple example. At one point, our church was exploding. It was just growing so quickly and parking was always a problem. You know, one of the things that we would tell our staff is never, ever, ever park in the parking lot, go somewhere else, park somewhere else.

But this isn't about you. And so even today, when I'm pulling up into a church to meet with a pastor or whatever, begin work with them, I just have to chuckle when I see the little sign there that says Pastor's parking space. If our churches are primarily should be primarily geared to help people who are far away from God find him and draw close to him.

And one of the ways, certainly in American culture, is by checking out a church, why in the world would we put up any barriers for someone to be able to come into the church? Why would there be any barriers? Why would we want to make it even just a hair harder to walk through the doors? That's funny. I a quick, quick story about Chuck Smith, the late Chuck Smith, pastor of Calvary Chapel, Costa mesa, Jesus Revolution.

The movie just came out as part of him. We were actually at a conference at Calvary Chapel, Costa mesa, and this guy said, Hey, look, that's Chuck Smith over there. And I said, Oh, no way. You know, kind of celebrity grew up learning from his teaching. He was walking from the furthest parking space there was, and this was his habit.

And the dude is like 147 years old at the time. And if anybody had earned a right to have a parking space and at that age, I mean, like honor the guy, but he would not do it and he would walk from the furthest parking space and he would pick up trash on his way. That just told me so much about this kind of leader.

So, Dave, what I'm hearing you say is speed of the team, speed of the leader. That's how the culture is going to be shaped. Mike, I'm curious to know from your context, where have you seen entitlement just kind of slip in again? It's not malicious. It's not an intentional thing. Where have you seen that just kind of slip into your culture?

Yeah, I think a big way to find out if there is a kind of entitlement culture or something like that is to look at the sacred cows. To me, a sacred cow is something that is a traditional piece of your church that is not helping your mission move forward. It could be a painting. It could be an organ.

It could be it could be a library. Oh, my goodness. Don't get me started. We have we have all three of those pieces at the church I work with. So anyone who's listening who knows me, not report me. But, you know, when you're looking at just changing some things up, if your vision is to create small group space and you don't have enough small group space, but it's going to mess with the sacred cow.

And you start to get pushback. That's I mean, to me, that's an entitlement. Culture is are you a welcoming church? Dave just talked about are you taking every barrier away from parking to someone walking in your church to get coffee if you're stuck on some of those tiny details and worried about those tiny details so you can keep some of these other programs going that aren't pushing the mission ball forward.

To me, it's a little bit of entitlement, and I know that's hard for a lot of people at the church to understand when it's their program that might need to get cut or that is not vision or things like that. But it comes back to the sermon hood culture. It's pretty clear that that entitlement culture has taken over and there's not a servant hood culture that's making them go out to other people or to welcome people into their church as well.

Dave, you wrote the book Elemental Leaders. There's a couple of interesting points that you make on the topic of servant hood because at the end of the day, we're really talking about cultivating a culture. I call it an atmosphere. You actually call it a vibe that is outward focused, that just bleeds. Servant Hood So you talk about four different vibe drivers.

I'd love to chat through those. The first one you talk about is just a style and personas of your primary presenter, and to some extent you've already talked about that. But if you want to offer some clarity on that, can you can you give us a little something something there? Well, again, what we're talking about is the church service itself.

So if we're thinking of our church service as being a primary way to present or to offer the beauty and the power of the gospel message, the goodness of God, the sacrifice of Jesus and so forth, well, then that should change the way we think about what we do in the church service itself. It's not uncommon for me to sit in a church that we're working with and you just really feel like an outsider.

There's no way that you feel part of it. Is that because a language is that because of what's what is how does that show itself to in numbers, the ways that language is a big, big deal, the way that we make people feel comfortable who are not part of our community is a huge thing. The Greek word actually, for hospitality literally means a love of strangers.

And so that changes everything. Then if if we want to consider our weekend services as being the primary front door to the message of Jesus, if that's the case, then yeah, it's language, it's music, it's everything. So I've been working with a lot of traditional churches here recently, and because I've been out of that world for so long in the tradition that I was a part of that I don't quite understand the love affair with pipe organs.

My question is, who relates to that? Because I'm an old guy and I don't have anything in any of my playlist anywhere. I don't have anything on Spotify that has anything to do with a pipe organ or a choir. And so I'm fascinated why that would be a musical star that we would want to hang on to, even know no one else in the culture practically can relate to it.

That tells me pretty quickly that that group of people is pretty interested in the things that they want, that feel comfortable to them. That seems very odd to me from a servant orientation. So as Paul mentioned, the first one is the is just the style and the persona of the people who are up front. So those are worship leaders or choir directors or hosts or musicians or people who give the announcements or whoever gets up on the podium or the stage or the desk or whatever you call it.

It's their persona that quickly gives you a feel for, Oh, I know what this is about. Now I would take it into the front office to people answering the phones, whether it's an organization or a church, whoever is representing the face of this church, we were constantly coaching them on how they presented themselves because we never knew who was on the other end of that line.

And if we're going to cultivate a culture that is completely outward focused, it's just got to make sense. I had a buddy of mine call me up out of nowhere. It was just actually a really big blessing. And he said, Hey, man, I just want bro, I just want to pray for you. And it was it was very it was very organic.

It was very like he related to me. I'm from Southern California. I use a lot of Southern California vernacular and all this. As soon as he started praying, he turned on the King James version. I have no problem with the King James. It was like he put on a different face. Now the prayer was beautiful and I felt blessed and I was so appreciative of the of the phone call.

But there's something in us that says we need to turn on a certain way. And I just you can tell I'm getting kind of passionate about it because we're just missing people in particular. We're missing some of our younger generation. It's not just a generational thing, but we are missing some of our generation because we haven't tapped in to the culture like a missionary should.

And as a leader, you should not apologize for correcting or coaching with love. I mean, be nice about it, but help people see that they are vision carriers and what they say and what they do really exemplifies that. The people that are put up front, do they come off as harsh? Do they come off as insincere? Do they come off as bored?

It's all those things that you want to think about. A million years ago, when I was leading worship, it was really important to me to have a particular tatted up, long haired musician in the worship band back in those days because it made a statement that anyone could come to this church. Anyone. It was really critical that people saw someone that maybe looked like them or helped them feel comfortable or whatever.

And now it's even more important because every church is live streaming their service out. Every single person who has come to our church, who has checked us out in-person. First, check this out online. I mean, we do surveys. We ask everyone who comes members, things like that, those people up front, it's even more important because you're reaching a wider audience or have potential to reach that wider audience now than ever before.

Yeah, that's really good, Mike. I remember when we were doing multiple services. After each service we had a thing called the ten minute meet up in which for 10 minutes you could meet with the pastor right after the celebration and we got him celebrations, not service, primarily because we didn't want people to think that their service to God was actually sitting in a church service.

It just seemed so goofy to us. But anyway, for 10 minutes you could meet the pastor, particularly if you were new. And the standard question I would ask new people are, Hey, how did you hear about us? And for years it was, oh, a friend told me about this guy at work or, you know, somebody in my family.

Towards the end of our time, it became all about, Oh, I checked your website out, and that was years ago. And so now you think about that as being the front door of your church. It's really important. Not that we look professional. I'm not into that. I'm not into the slick show, but that we look real, that we're being authentic.

And there were being servant oriented in our approach toward people. Yeah, 100%. And that's one of the things we do at the Elemental Group. We offer comments and coaching on that because it is the four year, the narthex, whatever you call the lobby of your church, that's what that is. I want to move on to the next driver.

Driver number two, the expressed values of your church or organization. Again, these are drivers to drive a vibe, to drive an atmosphere, a culture. The first one is the style and personas of your primary presenter driver. Number two is the expressed values of your church and organization. We talked a couple of podcasts back about mission and how important mission was that.

It couldn't just be a plaque on the wall. It actually had to be something that drove our culture. Wouldn't you say that values are the same thing? How could we use driver number two to help encourage driver number one? Oh, I love this question. You start with your values. I mean, our values are how we act. It creates your culture.

One of the values of the church I work at is we want to be radical welcomes. So that goes like that. Everything we do, we want to be known as radical welcome here. So we're actually in the process of sitting down with every single piece of our church to kind of walk through and say, if the kids ministry is radically welcoming, how do we act that out?

Like, what does it actually look like if you're radically welcoming? So then you're building culture to f the front desk that we just talked about is no matter who comes in, in the building or who comes in the office, you stand up to greet them. Right. Or you offer to get them coffee. So we're starting to train and think through.

Give us another lens to look through. What does it look like to be radical? Well, of course. But you do that with all your values and that goes up to Sunday morning on stage or at the pulpit. You know, we want to be radically welcoming to both groups. We have two different worship styles at our church. It looks different at both services, but we need to be super intentional with it in how we're building that culture.

Because when you're building culture, you're also breaking down an old culture that is just ingrained in people, you know, this is how we've always done it. So it takes prey three or four times the effort to change that, to build that new culture. But it's so important you're developing an organizational habit. One of the things we used to do at our new leaders orientation that we would offer quarterly is we would actually go through our values.

We teach on them, and then we would have the group break up into smaller groups and they would actually do skits on these values, just humorous skits. And we found that doing a humor script actually, we pulled out the essence of the value and ingrained it into them and really helped cultivate this organizational habit. I think the key word in that driver is expressed.

So how do we express our values? Yeah. So for instance, the mission of the church where I pastor was to love the people of Cincinnati and to relationship with Jesus. So that was pretty clear. And so our primary value was being outward focused or servant oriented. You try to express that in many ways possible, but here's where the rubber meets the road.

If on Monday morning I'm meeting with my team or my staff or my lead team or whoever, and the first question I ask is, how was the offering? Well, then we're in real trouble because what they're clearly hearing then is, oh, my real value is about finances. That's the really important thing here. So all of a sudden over undermined what our core value is by expressing something differently.

That's fantastic. Yeah. So if we're not clear on expressing our true values, we're in trouble. You know, we do this email blast every Tuesday morning and just talked about what churches will survive. And in my opinion, the only churches that are going to survive will be outward focused churches. If they're not outward focused, the inwardness will eventually shrink them until they age out and they're gone.

It's not that nickels and noses are not important. Of course they're very important and they are an indicator of how your church is doing from a health standpoint. But maybe trying to celebrate something differently upfront because there's a phrase that says We become what we celebrate those things that you celebrate, that's what you will become. That's what people will reach for.

That's what people will look for. That's what people will try to remanufacture in their own context, in their church or their organizations. Let's talk about theology. The third driver is let's talk about theology. The third driver is your theology. And Dave, in the book you used an interesting phrase, your experienced theology. Can you help us understand clearly what you mean there?

Maybe the best way would be it would be like this if I communicate that salvation is the most important thing that a human individual will experience. And yet I really haven't experienced that myself, or the church hasn't seen it experienced. Then something's missing. I may have a well thought out theology intellectually, but if I haven't experienced it, there's something missed there.

For instance, in the world that I pastored. Then we had a very high concept of grace. It explain the way we relate it to people on the outside and so forth. So Grace was really, really critical. So from my worship leading years, I had such a high value for evangelism are a high value for people who are far away from God to find God that that that trumped everything.

So bringing people on the worship team who were not yet believers was really fun for me because I would tell them, just hang out with me for a while and I'm telling you something's going to happen. And I actually found this. I can go off on a side here that the bar musicians when we started a 1:00 in the afternoon service, that's when all the bar players started to come to our church and and especially when I just got one of them, got one of them to be in the band who was a well-known musician or session player in the city then was like, Hey, so-and-so is going to this church.

So then other musicians were on check it up. So then it started to be easy pickings. So one of the things that I would do with these guys who would come in and as a matter of fact, they were easier to work with for me than the church vocalists divas who would drive me crazy. The church people in the band would drive me crazy.

They'd complain about the monitors or they couldn't hear themselves. They're blah, blah, blah, blah. And the bar players were just thrilled to have a Nessim 57 They didn't smell like beer and tweeters there were blown in their monitors back then. So I take these guys entitlement. Yes, it is, isn't it? So I take these guys on and one of the things I would not do was a heavy rehearsal schedule.

I wouldn't do a heavy rehearsal schedule. The songs were simple enough and basic enough that we could kind of flow with them, and the good musicians had no problem, just kind of pick it up and they learn how to listen to other musicians and play with them, not get busy and so forth. So I didn't have much of a rehearsal schedule.

As a matter of fact, I would tell these guys, You come with me and we're going to carry bags of groceries out to the projects this weekend. And if you learn about Grace, it'll get you out of that crazy musicians performance mentality that I got to perform. And if you get out of the performance mentality and you really understand Grace, it'll set you free.

And it was liberating to these guys, you know? So much of us believe our self-worth is how well we can perform, which is so different than how God sees everything about us. We are human beings before we are human doings. If you have a experienced theology of grace, then that affects the way you treat people, how you respond to people, and how you quote unquote perform.

That's so good. I remember being out doing different projects in the community and we had so many people who didn't know God, who were who just wanted to sign up because it was in them to do good as they experienced the community, as they experienced the cause. So often times they would be like, This just feels good. I love this.

And it was an opportunity to just say, Hey, you know what? This is how God actually wired us. You know, Ephesians two eight, nine and ten talks about how we're masterpieces and we were created for good work. So that feeling that you feel right now, it's because you're working in alignment with the specification that God put in you.

That's an experienced theology where it's almost caught first, then taught these guys on the worship team, right? They're experiencing community, their experience of service, their experience in selflessness, all of this stuff. And it's just such a powerful way to transmit a culture of servant. Hood I absolutely love it. Let's go to the fourth driver. The fourth driver I love this phrase is the permissible presence of God.

We're talking about four different drivers that drive live, a culture that's outward focused, a culture of servant hood. And the fourth one is the permissible presence of God. What were you talking about there? Well, on one hand, we know that when we gather together, according to Jesus, two or three gathered in my name, then I'm there, he says.

So we know that God doesn't need permission to step into anything or to whatever permission to do anything. But he also loves his bride, and he doesn't seem to trespass where she is unwilling or reticent. So there seems to me that there's something powerful about not just acknowledging the presence of God, but inviting the presence of God into whatever we're doing.

That just kind of changes everything. I mean, the simplicity of our prayers back in the day was, God, if you don't show up, nothing really happens here. We're just going through the motions and it's based on Jesus saying, Apart from me, you can do nothing. There's something beautiful about asking and permitting and requesting or inviting the presence of God into the things that we're doing on Sundays.

Okay, so let me identify the tension that is probably getting everybody's attention right now, because as you're talking, I noticed something inside of me where I'm like, I will smoke whatever it is you're selling right now. Dave This is like so my vibe right here. Mike You're from more of a traditional context. How does this resonate with you?

And then how how is it transmitted into your culture? The permissible presence of God? As I'm processing a number of different things are going through my head. So I feel like sometimes that people they've been in church for 30, 40, 50 years. That entitlement has set in. And I want to believe that the presence of God is in their life, but it's not showing itself outwardly where it's like.

And maybe that's a judgment I'm making. It probably is. You're so judgmental. I can't be. I am so judgmental. But something needs to be drawn out of these people again, right? There needs to be a spiritual like re baptism kind of moment for the people. Sometimes in this traditional setting. And you see it and we just talked about the churches who are going to be here and ten, 20, 30 years from now, they're the ones who are outward focused.

I believe bringing in the presence of God is a humbling thing to do. So can we humble ourselves to do that in this traditional setting? I think the answer for a lot of churches is no. Unfortunately, this is how we've always done it, and it worked back in the 1960s and seventies. So it should work now, right. But the traditional setting that I'm more familiar with, it kind of scares me for the future for some of these churches.

Okay. Yeah. The question I asked in the book was regarding this particular driver was, are the leaders in your church? Are they desiring, are they acknowledging, are they wanting the presence of God, the reality and the presence of God in the service, or have the mechanics of the weekend service just kind of run that out? For instance, you know, we are the more contemporary worship band type thing, and I'd hear the band walk off stage.

They be coming back around the back and and almost always I'd hear like, Oh man, I blew it. On the turnaround there. You know, I was half beat off on this or whatever it is, all technical stuff. I remember telling our worship leader what point I said, Man, what I'd love to hear was did you guys, since the presence of God when we were doing this, or did you feel like something just kind of lifted in a room that that sort of thing or what what?

C.S. Lewis referred to as the numinous, that sense of presence or something else with us. In the early days of our place, it was almost every week I'd hear someone say, during worship, I just started crying. I mean, like, what's going on in this place? And it wasn't because we were that special, you know, a band that's half rehearsed.

So it really wasn't that great. It was the presence of God that made all the difference, that made the reality of God suddenly who something is in the room. Yeah. And it's not that the technical stuff's not important. It's just absolutely as a leader and again, as the style and persona of your leader and your primer, the primary presenters pay attention to what you celebrate first, right?

So celebrate the presence of God. We're going to land this plane. So wherever you're at on this pathway, maybe you've got a culture that's just bleeding servant hood that is just completely outward focus. And then maybe you're on the other side of this pathway where there is just not a hint or a whisper of servant hood. But what are some simple things we can do to begin to lead our leadership in that direction?

You know, the obvious answer is you model first. Yeah. So if I'm not doing the stuff, then it's not it's not going to happen. So for many, many, many years, every Saturday we would go out and just do some really basic what we called servant evangelism, just basic outreaches, just to express God's love and simple, practical way. So it was everything from free car washes to cleaning the bathrooms of local businesses to picking up trash, to passing out water bottles or Cokes and, you know, busy intersections or traffic jams or whatever.

Anything we could do. And to be clear, you were there as the leader. Yes. And so every Saturday, that was it for a couple of hours. I got to speak that Saturday night I got four services and Sunday morning you just made it work because that was way more critical than anything I would say, honestly. Okay. And so that's that's the timber that sets the culture for the people who are volunteering at stepping up and for your staff as well.

Mike, anything you would throw into just some tools or techniques or tips or advice that you could give leaders on any side to begin to lean or lean harder in that direction of servant hood Yeah, I'd go back to values, you know, what are the values that you want to act out, that you're you want your staff, your congregation to act out on a daily basis at church, in their homes, in their community.

Get very clear on that. And then just like the other things, you have to talk about it constantly. That language needs to be used, put on walls, talked about in your announcements or however you open your services. You're constantly using that language just to reinforce this is who we are and how we act it out on a consistent basis.

Yeah, that's so good. That's so good. That's good. I once posted a question online. Have you ever had a boss or a manager that you worked long hours, you worked hard? What made them worth working that hard for? There were a couple themes that stuck out, and one of them was that my boss noticed me. They noticed my contributions, they noticed my work.

There was an appreciation there. It was stated over and over that my boss was in there with me. I was in the trenches with me. It just meant that they were engaged with you at an emotional level. And so if you've got a staff or you got a crew or maybe it's your volunteer leaders, that goes a long way.

People want to know that their boss notices them and appreciates them. This has been an invigorating conversation and obviously the three of us are passionate about it. In fact, we even got a little sassy during the talk, but this is such a critical value to essential to leadership, essential to healthy organizations. And again, we're talking through the four different values that we believe need to be present in healthy organizations.

And so we hope that this value has brought value to those of you who are listening. We've said it before. We'll say it again. You are not alone as the leader in your organization. If at the very least you have a friend in the Elemental Group, please call us. Reach out to us. It doesn't cost you anything. We'd love to encourage you.

And then we can certainly point you to some resources and to some people that can help you along the way. But for now, we're going to say goodbye and we'll see you next time. We'll talk to you soon. You've been listening to the Elemental Leader's podcast. Visit us at Elemental Group dot org for more great resources.